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So What Passes for Food These Days?

Published Mar 21 2010 by Energy Bulletin, Archived Mar 21 2010

by Olga Bonfiglio

You are what you eat, as the saying goes, but if you don't know what you're eating, how can you be all you want to be?

The pervasiveness of genetically-engineered (GE) food in America provides a glimpse of the ethical lapse our corporations and government have come to in allowing such food on the market—without American consumers knowing it.

Worse yet, I’ve found that most people do not know what GE foods are—and that includes grocery store managers.

The masking of GE foods brings us to yet another sad but true example that when it comes to policymaking, it’s all about money and power and the people be damned.  READ MORE

Health is the Tipping Point to Identify and Eliminate GMOs

Published on Saturday, March 13, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

by Olga Bonfiglio

 

Are Americans willing to jeopardize their health with GMO foods? 

Jeffrey Smith, author of Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies about the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You Are Eating (2003), is convinced that they are not, so he started the Campaign for Healthier Eating in America, which calls for the elimination of GMO foods altogether.   

He spoke recently at the annual Michigan Organic Farm and Food Association conference held at Michigan State University and provided participants with resources and inspiration for joining the movement to eliminate genetically-engineered (GM) foods. 

Smith figures that it will take only 15 million Americans or 5 percent of the population, to pressure food companies not to use GMO ingredients or products and thus establish a tipping point for change.   
Potential target audiences receptive to his message include food co-ops, health-conscious shoppers, schools, parents of young children, medical practitioners, green groups, chefs, food service executives.  Meanwhile, physicians are already telling their patients to avoid GMOs and religious organizations are looking into the ethical and spiritual aspects of food production, he said.

"When people see what is going on, they realize that it's bad," said Smith.  "We want to take that energy and turn it into effective action instead of feeling like victims.  We want people to say to themselves:  ‘I determine what food I eat.'"  READ MORE

Relying on GM Crops to Battle Climate Change 'Suicidal,' Indian Activist Charges

Published on Monday, March 15, 2010 by Reuters AlertNet

 by Laurie Goering

LONDON - Faced with growing demand for food and increasingly unpredictable weather, many developing nations are debating whether to relax restrictions on the use of genetically modified crops.
Seed developers promise that a coming generation of genetically modified (GM) food crops will have climate-resilient features, from drought resistance to saltwater tolerance.

But widespread adoption of GM varieties by small farmers would be "suicidal in terms of climate change," said Vandana Shiva, an Indian social activist, environmentalist and proponent of small-scale farming.

"The (GM) system is more about companies making money from farmers than food security," she told AlertNet in an interview in London.

Adopting GM crops puts small farmers at greater financial risk because they often have to borrow money to buy more expensive GM seeds. If their crops fail, particularly repeatedly, they can find themselves unable to repay the loans, she said.

Worldwide, crop failures are increasingly harder to predict because the climate is becoming more erratic.

In recent years there has been an unprecedented spate of suicides by heavily indebted cotton farmers in Central India, Shiva said. More than three quarters of the suicides, her research shows, have been committed by farmers using GM cotton seed and struggling to repay loans.

GM suppliers sell their seeds on the condition that farmers buy fresh seed each year - something many growers can't afford if their crop fails. A decade ago, 80 percent of Indian farmers saved part of their harvest as seed to plant the following season's crops, Shiva said.

EXISTING SOLUTIONS
Plenty of drought- and flood-resistant traditional crop varieties already exist and simply need to be brought back to market, supporters of traditional farming say.

Shiva said India has hundreds of varieties of rice, and many that show resistance to flooding, drought and saltwater are now being carefully bred at Indian research institutes to increase yields and are then re-released to farmers.

In India's northeast Assam province, where fields have been flooded for weeks after intense rains, demand has surged for two rice varieties that can survive weeks under water and also produce well even in dry conditions.

Planting a broader variety of crop strains - rather than a couple of GM varieties - should help protect the world food supply and insure it against emerging climate threats, including an expanding range of crop pests.

While a pest might decimate some varieties of crops, it is unlikely it could destroy a wide range of varieties, she said.

"Resilience is built through diversity," Shiva said.

Keeping small farmers on their land is also key, she said, because small farmers are more productive per acre than big-scale growers, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation's figures.
"The majority of people in the world are still farming on small farms," she said. "If we're addressing food security we'd better enhance the security of small farms."

India's government recently delayed releasing a GM aubergine, which would have been the country's first GM vegetable, calling for more testing in the face of protests by environmentalists and some farmers.

Climate Change and Agriculture: Biodiverse Ecological Farming Is the Answer, Not Genetic Engineering

by Vandana Shiva 

 

Industrial globalised agriculture is heavily implicated in climate change. It contributes to the three major greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the use of fossil fuels, nitrogen oxide (N₂O) from the use of chemical fertilizers and methane (CH₄) from factory farming. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC), atmospheric concentration of CO₂ has increased from a pre–industrial concentration of about 280 parts per million to 379 parts per million in 2005. The global atmospheric concentration of CH₄ has increased from pre–industrial concentration of 715 parts per billion to 1774 parts per billion in 2005. The global atmospheric concentration of N₂O, largely due to use of chemical fertilizers in agriculture, increased from about 270 parts per billion to 319 parts per billion in 2005.

Industrial agriculture is also more vulnerable to climate change which is intensifying droughts and floods. Monocultures lead to more frequent crop failure when rainfall does not come in time, or is too much or too little. Chemically fertilized soils have no capacity to withstand a drought. And cyclones and hurricanes make a food system dependent on long distance transport highly vulnerable to disruption.

Genetic engineering is embedded in an industrial model of agriculture based on fossil fuels. It is falsely being offered as a magic bullet for dealing with climate change.   READ MORE

Dr. Vandana Shiva is a philosopher, environmental activist and eco feminist. She has fought for changes in the practice and paradigms of agriculture and food, and assisted grassroots organizations of the Green movement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland, and Austria with campaigns against genetic engineering. In 1982, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, which led to the creation of Navdanya in 1991, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. She is author of numerous books including, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis; Stolen Harvest: The hijacking of the Global food supply; Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace; and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as NGOs, including the International Forum on Globalization, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and the Third World Network. She has received numerous awards, including 1993 Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) and the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize.